The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye

Toward an American Independent Tradition

Nancy Chodorow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429649158
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition, Nancy J. Chodorow brings together her two professional identities, psychoanalyst and sociologist, as she also brings together and moves beyond two traditions within American psychoanalysis, naming for the first time an American independent tradition. The book's chapters move inward, toward fine-tuned discussions of the theory and epistemology of the American independent tradition, which Chodorow locates originally in the writings of Erik Erikson and Hans Loewald, and outward toward what Chodorow sees as a missing but necessary connection between psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and the social world.

Chodorow suggests that Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson, self-defined ego psychologists, each brings in the intersubjective, attending to the fine-tuned interactions of mother and child, analyst and patient, and individual and social surround. She calls them intersubjective ego psychologists—for Chodorow, the basic theory and clinical epistemology of the American independent tradition. Chodorow describes intrinsic contradictions in psychoanalytic theory and practice that these authors and later American independents address, and she points to similarities between the American and British independent traditions.

The American independent tradition, especially through the writings of Erikson, points the analyst and the scholar to individuality and society. Moving back in time, Chodorow suggests that from his earliest writings to his last works, Freud was interested in society and culture, both as these are lived by individuals and as psychoanalysis can help us to understand the fundamental processes that create them. Chodorow advocates for a return to these sociocultural interests for psychoanalysts. At the same time, she rues the lack of attention within the social sciences to the serious study of individuals and individuality and advocates for a field of individuology in the university.

1

THE AMERICAN INDEPENDENT TRADITION

Loewald, Erikson, and the (possible) rise of intersubjective ego psychology

“What’s American about American psychoanalysis?” Here I introduce, name, and describe an independent tradition in American psychoanalysis. My account has both theoretical and historico-cultural dimensions. Theoretically, I suggest that, just as the British independent tradition, known early on as “the Middle Group,” incorporated elements of both the Anna Freudian ego psychological and the Kleinian approaches, so also the American independent tradition incorporated and synthesized elements from the two dominant and antagonistic schools—Hartmannian ego psychology and Sullivanian interpersonal psychoanalysis—that constituted classical American psychoanalysis. I call this synthesizing theory intersubjective ego psychology.

Intersubjective ego psychology remains firmly committed to ego psychological understandings and technique while also theorizing, without thereby coming to self-identify as either interpersonal or relational, the centrality and pervasive impact of the object-relational, developmental, and transference-countertransference fields. I locate the origins of the American independent tradition and intersubjective ego psychology in the work of Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson.

Both Loewald and Erikson begin from self-identification as ego psychologists, but each brings in, foundationally, something of the relational-interpersonal. Loewald gives us the most comprehensive and finely detailed description that we have of intersubjectivity in the analytic dyad and the psychoanalytic process, while among Erikson’s eight stages, basic trust, intimacy, generativity, and ego integrity point especially to the intersubjective (this last, a relationship with the self).¹ Throughout, Erikson attends to the sociohistorical and to personality and culture. Each nods to the other’s terrain, Erikson with his eminently intersubjective eight stages, and Loewald with his later writings on life history and the history of the individual, as well as in his conceptualization of the child’s being centered upon by her mother.

My account of the American independent tradition is historical and cultural as well as theoretical and clinical. In what follows, I explore and make tentative suggestions about what makes American psychoanalysis American, though I also suggest that defining, other than descriptively, what is characteristically American is itself problematic and can be done only with self-conscious irony. Through its historical exploration, the chapter provides a brief reminder of psychoanalytic controversies in the United States, and it considers schematically the relations between “American” and “European” psychoanalysis.

“What’s American about American psychoanalysis?” Mitchell and Harris suggest that “national character and sensibility, environment and place, political and social history must have a deep and pervasive impact on the ways in which psychoanalysis has developed in different countries” (2004, p. 166).² Such an observation, expressing an assumption that national character and sensibility are among those subjects we can talk and write about, moves us right to the heart of the matter. The assumption is grounded, recursively, in the work of the uniquely American, psychoanalytically influenced anthropological field of culture and personality founded and elaborated by Ruth Benedict, Abram Kardiner, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, and many others, a tradition that in turn directly shaped and was intertwined with the only homegrown classical American psychoanalytic tradition: the interpersonal-cultural psychoanalysis initiated and theorized by Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm. At the same time, Mitchell and Harris’s question and claim require us to characterize theoretically and describe the history of the various psychoanalyses that happen, empirically, to have developed on American soil and to see these developments in the light of the larger history and culture of the country.

I have found myself diffident before these challenges. Even as I am mindful that no single characterization can be comprehensive, I elaborate in what follows one historical and theoretical reading of American psychoanalysis. I center my theoretical investigation on the contributions of Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson. I also suggest some ways in which American psychoanalysis is distinctly American. Much of what characterizes American psychoanalysis reflects what we (and our European critics, the most severe of whom, perhaps, was Freud) might consider national patterns.

The project of defining what makes something distinctly American returns me to my own professional psychoanalytic roots. Swept away in my earliest college years by Childhood and Society (Erikson 1950) and Patterns of Culture (Benedict 1934) but having training and a continuing partial professional identity in contemporary psychological anthropology (see Chodorow 1999a), I am aware that the legacy of national character studies and culture and personality anthropology is extremely problematic. Both within anthropology and in contemporary multicultural studies, we have learned that generalizations about cultural or national character obscure as much as they illuminate, and that this obscuring has often been at the political and cultural expense of marginalized groups and at the empirical cost of psychological individuality.³

At the same time, however, generalizations about national or cultural characteristics (and similarly, about qualities of gender, ethnicity, and so forth) always do seem to have a grain of truth—recognizable patterns that apply widely, even as we also see exceptions and variation. In what follows, I do not resist the temptations of generalizing. I not only attempt the difficult task of characterizing American psychoanalysis, but I also suggest what is distinctly “American” about it. Mindful that such generalizations cannot at the same time be made, I see this latter characterization through a distinctly ironic and recursively self-eliminating lens. I am serious and playful at the same time when I suggest that the features I describe hang together as quintessentially “American.”

In order to make such a claim, of course, I overgeneralize about cultural characteristics and ignore exceptions, overlaps, and variation. I probably overgeneralize too much for historical and cultural accuracy and not enough for persuasive argument. This caveat is equally true of the comparative generalizations I have to make along the way about what is not American—particularly my claims about what is “European” or what characterizes “European” approaches to psychoanalysis.

I focus on the origins of, and try to articulate, a strand in American thinking that I call, provisionally, intersubjective ego psychology. Intersubjective ego psychology integrates the two theoretical and clinical developments that, indisputably, have characterized American psychoanalysis, first, ego psychology, and second, interpersonal (its current label, but in the past it was also called “cultural school” or “neo-Freudian”) psychoanalysis. I am describing, not surprisingly, my own psychoanalytic location and identity. I see intersubjective ego psychology as a sort of middle terrain between classical structural and contemporary ego psychology on the one hand and classical interpersonal and contemporary relational psychoanalysis on the other, much as the British independent or Middle Group (with which the American independent tradition shares some theoretical and clinical commonality) originally located itself between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud.⁴

Intersubjective ego psychology involves an apparently contradictory insistence, following the Hartmann-Anna Freud legacy, on a radical “one-person” intrapsychic perspective centered on fantasy, drive-derivative wishes, resistances, defenses, and compromise formations, and in consonance with the work of Sullivan, Horney, Thompson, Frieda Fromm-Reichman, and others, on the “two-person” importance of the analytic, the mother-child, and, by extension sometimes, the sociocultural field.⁵ Intersubjective ego psychologists use the ego psychological language of interpretation, individuality, autonomy, insight, analytic neutrality, and other similar concepts, and also the language of enactment, transference-countertransference, the contribution of the analyst’s mind and subjectivity, and other similar concepts that arose initially from interpersonal psychoanalysis. In addition, although advocacy of an analytic attitude of uncertainty and curiosity rather than certainty and authority has crossed all psychoanalytic schools in recent years (protagonists of these different schools, of course, have different opinions about the uncertainty and curiosity of those in other schools), I think it can be said that the founding intersubjective ego psychologists, like the founding British independents, found their way to this attitude sooner.

The theoretical-clinical label intersubjective ego psychology comes initially from my reading of contemporary thinkers (especially Dale Boesky, Judith Chused, Theodore Jacobs, James McLaughlin, Warren Poland, and Owen Renik),⁶ but I center my remarks on two earlier thinkers, Loewald and Erikson, who, in my mind, initially created this hybrid and defined its territory. My original title for this chapter was “Working notes on American psychoanalysis,” and my musings remain exactly this. Each draft has reminded me of further problems in my characterizations, occasioned more second thoughts, and suggested more distinctions that I should be making. I hope, nonetheless, that the ideas have some generativity in helping us think about this complex, and of course still unfinished, American psychoanalysis.

The first of my second thoughts requires elaboration. By naming the American independent tradition as intersubjective ego psychology, I begin perhaps more from Loewald than from Erikson. I thus minimize another important American hybrid outcome, one that we might call cultural ego psychology. Cultural ego psychology would bring Erikson more to the fore, and I think in this context especially of contributions by those formed in ego psychological institutes that have challenged, from an explicitly feminist stance, traditional psychosexual and gender theories (books include Almond 2010, Balsam 2012, Kulish and Holtzman 2008, Notman and Nadelson 1982, and Person 1999).⁷ These for the most part medically trained psychoanalysts emphasize, like Erikson, bodily psychosexual experience and the actual female body, while also following Horney and Thompson in stressing that cultural factors have shaped female and male psychology and psychoanalysts’ theories about these. By contrast, those of us who were feminists first and then psychoanalysts (relational feminists like Benjamin, Dimen, Goldner, and Harris, and a hybrid intersubjective ego psychologist like myself) have been much longer in coming to acknowledge the actual body (see Chodorow 1999b, 2003c, and, for founding relational feminist accounts of sexuality, Dimen 1996, 2003).

Several caveats seem in order. First, part of what makes it so difficult to define what is American about American psychoanalysis is the pre- and post-World War II psychoanalytic diaspora. Until a certain generation, most of the leading “American” psychoanalysts (Sullivan and Thompson are the most notable exceptions) were born, educated, and trained in Europe. Loewald and Erikson are no exception. Neither of these third-generation psychoanalysts began life or professional training in the United States (this is also characteristically American: the United States is a country of immigrants).

Second, I write throughout of “American” in the imperialist sense, meaning psychoanalysis in the United States. Third, as I have indicated, much of what I claim characterizes these quintessentially “American” thinkers Erikson and Loewald also characterizes the theory, the developmental approach, the view of the analytic encounter, and the analytic attitude found in the writings of contemporaneous British psychoanalysts like Michael and Enid Balint, Margaret Little, Marion Milner, D. W. Winnicott, and others of their generation in the British independent tradition. In contrast to Klein, Anna Freud, and many of their followers, with the exception of Michael Balint these British independents were all British-born.

Finally, as a psychoanalyst trained in a psychoanalytic institute of “The American,” as we in shorthand call the American Psychoanalytic Association (another imperialism, this time within the imperialist center itself), it is not accidental that I am beginning and working out from ego psychology and an intrapsychic, one-person perspective, not only as an historical feature of American psychoanalysis but also, implicitly, as an important perspective on psychic life.⁸ Yet I originally found psychoanalysis from without and not from within, as a solution to problems in psychological anthropology and feminism (Chodorow 1974).

I am mindful, being a social scientist as well as a psychoanalyst, that if I had trained at a Sullivanian institute, whose approach would have been more consonant with my professional origins, I might well have begun this chapter with the view that it is precisely the cultural or interpersonal perspective that most distinguishes American psychoanalysis from its cognate practices in Europe or Latin America.⁹ My convoluted oscillations in these matters of my psychoanalytic origins and identifications, which do not at all begin from ego psychology, provide one perhaps extreme intellectual and historical instantiation of the characteristic conflicts and compromises in American psychoanalysis that, I believe, have led to that hybrid, intersubjective ego psychology that I describe here.

As a theorist, I was from the beginning looking to incorporate both the intrapsychic and the relational-interpersonal. My first systematic readings beyond Freud and Erikson were the British Middle Group—Fairbairn, Guntrip, Balint, and Winnicott. I argued then (Chodorow 1974, 1978) that, unlike psychological anthropology or Neo-Freudian psychoanalysis, these analysts provided a non-culturally determinist but fully relational intrapsychic perspective. Reaching from the beginning for conceptualizations that could maintain this doubled approach, I described differentiation and individuation as forms of connection and argued for what I termed “relational individualism” in both theory and clinical work (Chodorow 1979, 1986a).

Training and clinical work made the intrapsychic even more compelling and in need of articulation. For me, this included, especially, the Loewaldian world of transferences from the past and from the unconscious, the Kleinian and Loewaldian worlds of internal fantasy that so powerfully shape all experiences, conflicts, defenses, and compromise formations, and the unique, clinical individual—whatever the origins of all these in relationship, whatever the clinical relationship that helps them to become conscious or transformed. Klein with her emphasis on the intrapsychic focused on projective identification, splitting, envy, aggression, and spoiling was a first help, but finally the Kleinian approach seemed only partial—useful for certain psychic expressions but not others. Meanwhile, the classical ego psychology of transference as a resistance and the ego as a site of increasing self-observation and correction seemed to overrationalize the powers of unconscious meanings and psychic life. Loewald, by contrast, promised to encompass the whole. The perspective that I now call intersubjective ego psychology, then, brought together my own history and clinical and theoretical projects and also seemed to bring together those found in the vicissitudes of American psychoanalysis.

American identification with ego psychology, beginning shortly after World War II, has been repeatedly pointed out and, by now, repetitiously attacked. This identification emerged out of the psychoanalytic diaspora and the internal fights that it generated. Anna Freud, along with Heinz Hartmann, one of the founding theorists of ego psychology following Freud, found her views challenged by Klein and Klein’s followers when Miss Freud and her father arrived in England. It was important, therefore, that she maintain her connections to the Viennese émigré analysts who moved to the United States. American psychoanalysis, linked to Anna Freud in London and fueled by the arrival of many of Sigmund and Anna Freud’s colleagues and students, including the other great classical theorist of ego psychology, Heinz Hartmann, became a bastion of ego psychology. Following the arrival of these ego psychologists in the late 1930s and early 1940s, internal purges within the United States, beginning with Horney’s expulsion from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, ensured ego psychology’s triumph and the marginalization of the homegrown interpersonal-cu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The American Independent Tradition: Loewald, Erikson, and the (Possible) Rise of Intersubjective Ego Psychology
• Part I From Freud to Erikson
• Part II The Psychoanalytic Vision of Hans Loewald
• Part III American Independence: Theory and Practice
• Part IV Individuality as Bedrock in the Consulting Room and Beyond
• Afterword Could you Direct Me to the Individuology Department?
• Bibliography
• Index